Abstract
Technological change at current scale is not a series of isolated events, but a movement towards new, locally stable, earth systems states. These states integrate natural, environmental, cultural, theological, institutional, financial, managerial, technological, built and human dimensions, and change worldviews, and cultural and moral values. While technologies do not define these integrated earth system states, except by convenience, they are an important destabilizing force across society, generating not just new opportunities but also continuing transition costs. Moreover, because technologies create such powerful comparative advantages as between cultures, those cultures that attempt to block technology will, all things equal, eventually be dominated by those that embrace it. The implications of these dynamics, taken together, is that technological evolution will be difficult, if not impossible, to stop or even manage effectively. How to respond ethically, rationally, and responsibly to technological change is, therefore, both a difficult research question and a serious practical challenge to our existing legal and governance institutions.
Keywords
So long as we do not, through thinking, experience what is, we can never belong to what will be. … The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment.– Heidegger (1977)1
1Heidegger, M. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. (trans: Lovitt, W). New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks “The Turning,” 49; “The Age of the World Picture,” 136.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
While the best known series of Impressionist paintings of the railroad is probably Monet’s seven paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, which offer a wonderful treatment of the new technology, Manet’s The Railway, also known as the Gare Saint-Lazare, is more nuanced, with the characters in the foreground separated from the railroad by an iron fence, and the adult turning away from the steam of the railroad even as the child peers through the bars. Nonetheless, contemporary observers could not contain their passion for the new technology: as Jacques de Bies exclaimed in his lecture “Edouard Manet” in the Salles des Capucines, in Paris on January 22, 1884 (quoted in National Gallery of Art, 1998),
It’s true, the locomotive is missing and one does not see the train. The smoke is enough for me, because it denotes the fire, which is like the soul of the engine. And the engine, as you who are listening know well, is the intelligence, the glory, and the fortune of our century. For future generations, our nineteenth century will be a locomotive, just as papal Rome is a tiara, as Venice is a gondola,… and as our French Middle Ages is the armor of a baron.
References
Allenby, B.R. 2005. Reconstructing earth. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Allenby, B.R., and D. Sarewitz. 2011. The Techno-Human Condition. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Baer, J., J.C. Kaufman, and R.F. Baumeister. 2008. Are we free: Psychology and free will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bijker, W. E., T. P. Hughes, and T. Pinch, eds. 1997. The social construction of technological systems. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Boot, M. 2007. War made new. New York, NY: Gotham.
Bruchey, S.W. 1980. Small business in American life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Castells, M. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell Press.
Clark, G. 2007. A fairwell to alms: A brief economic history of the world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cronon, W., ed. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company.
De Grey, A.D. N.J. 2004. Strategies for engineered negligible senescence. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1019.
Freeman, C., and F. Louca. 2001. As time goes by: From the industrial revolutions to the information revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grubler, A. 1998. Technology and global change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hacking, I. 1999. The social construction of what? Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hayles, N.K. 1999. How we became posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heidegger, M. 1977. The question concerning technology and other essays (trans: Lovitt, W.). New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks.
IEEE Spectrum. 2004. Engineering and aging. Spectrum 41 (9): 10, 31–35.
Kurzweil, R. 2005. The singularity is near. New York, NY: Viking.
Landes, D.S. 1998. The wealth and poverty of nations. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co.
Marks, P. 2008. Rat-brained robots take their first steps. NewScientist 199 (2669): 22–23.
Marx, L. 1964. The machine in the garden: Technology and the pastoral ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McNeill, J.R. 2000. Something new under the sun. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Merchant, C. 1995. Reinventing Eden: Western culture as a recovery narrative. In Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature, ed. W. Cronon. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company.
Moravec, H. 1988. Mind children: The future of robot and human intelligence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
National Gallery of Art. 1998. Manet, Monet, and the Gare Saint-Lazare. Exhibition brochure. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art.
Nye, D.E. 1994. American technological sublime. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Nye, D.E. 2003. America as second creation: Technology and narratives of new beginning. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Physorg. 2008. U.S. Army invests in ‘thought helmet’ technology for voiceless communication. Physorg.com, http://www.physorg.com/printnews.php?newsid=141314439, Accessed 24 Sept 2008.
PSRM (Pacific Southwest Railway Museum). 2008. Railroad history: Important milestones in English and American Railway Development. http://www.sdrm.org/history/timeline. Accessed Oct 2008.
Roco, M.C., and W.S. Bainbridge, eds. 2003. Converging technologies for improving human performance. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Rosenberg, N., and L.E. Birdzell, Jr. 1986. How the west grew rich: The economic transformation of the industrial world. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Schivelbusch, W. 1977. The railway journey: The industrialization of time and space in the 19th century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Schumpeter, J.A. 1942 (reissued 2008). Capitalism, socialism and democracy. New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
Senge, P.M. 1990. The fifth discipline. New York, NY: Doubleday.
The Economist. 2008. The odd couple: a special report on the Koreas (center Section, 27 September 2008). The Economist.
Vijg, J. and J. Campisi. 2008. Puzzles, promises and a cure for aging. Nature 454: 1065–1071.
WECD (The World Commission on Environment and Development, also known as the Brundtland Commission). 1987. Our common future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Allenby, B.R. (2011). Governance and Technology Systems: The Challenge of Emerging Technologies. In: Marchant, G., Allenby, B., Herkert, J. (eds) The Growing Gap Between Emerging Technologies and Legal-Ethical Oversight. The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1356-7_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1356-7_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-1355-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-1356-7
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)